entertaining high school fraud

From espn.com:

“ODESSA, Texas — A West Texas student who led his high school basketball team to the state playoffs last season was actually a 22-year-old man, police said Tuesday.

Police say the basketball star was really Guerdwich Montimere, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Haiti who school officials say was recognized last month by Florida coaches as having been a star high school player in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., a few years ago.

Ector County school district officials said the man posed as 16-year-old Jerry Joseph and enrolled at Permian High School in Odessa for the 2009-2010 academic year. He also presented himself as homeless to the school’s basketball coach, Danny Wright, who took the boy in last summer, the coach said.”

The brazenness of some people can be really astonishing. A few years ago a small college basketball coach in Missouri was fired after lies were discovered on his resumé. And they weren’t small lies, but big ones that could easily be contradicted by the public record if anyone had bothered to check a bit earlier. I think he said he had been a four time all-SEC player at the University of Florida and then went on to an NBA career with the New Jersey Nets. When first confronted with the lies he even kept his cool, saying that he had no idea why Florida or the Nets had no record of his ever having played for them.